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So far, Google’s cars have driven 1.4 million miles around the company’s hometown of Mountain View, California and — more recently — in Austin, Texas.

“We have strong roots in Kirkland having established an office here a decade ago,” said Jennifer Haroon, head of business operations for the Google self–driving car project, in a press release today. “Kirkland has always been welcoming to Google and expanding our testing program here will give our self–driving cars some new learning experiences and let us hear from different communities as we develop this technology.”

The company says it also chose Kirkland because its wet weather (welcome to the Pacific Northwest!) and hills will allow its engineers to test the cars’ sensors in different situations and at different angles and elevations. “Testing in new cities enables our engineers to further refine our software and adapt to these different environments,” Google said today.

It doesn’t look like Google is bringing its home-built prototype vehicles to Kirkland, though. Instead, it’ll use its modified Lexus RX450h SUVs.

For now, the tests are also limited to a few square miles in North Kirkland because Google needs highly detailed maps of the areas its cars drive in. As it builds more detailed maps of the area, Google will likely expand its project to more areas of the city.

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Crunchbase

OverviewGoogle is a multinational corporation that is specialized in internet-related services and products. The company’s product portfolio includes Google Search, which provides users with access to information online; Knowledge Graph that allows users to search for things, people, or places as well as builds systems recognizing speech and understanding natural language; Google Now, which provides information …

OverviewIn 2009, Google started the self-driving car project, including team members who had already dedicated years to the technology. The testing fleet includes both modified Lexus SUVs and new prototype vehicles that are designed from the ground up to be fully self-driving. There are safety drivers aboard all vehicles for now.